The Third Person

The rest of Dennison’s house was decorated and furnished in the same minimalist, paper-motif manner as his living room. More tethered bundles of paper lined the walls of the hallway, and seemingly random scraps and sheets had been tacked to the wall on the stairs, like butterflies. It was covered with torn out pages from notepads, shopping receipts and carefully flattened, multi-coloured sheets. There was writing on all of them. In fact, Dennison had even scribbled here and there himself, looping practically unreadable sentences like ribbons around the bannister. He’d reduced the first floor landing to a metre-wide strip of tattered tortoise-shell carpet, with occasional breaks in between the stacks to allow for doorways into similarly loaded rooms. The place smelled musty – like a poorly attended aisle in an underfunded library.

‘I like what you’ve done with the place,’ I said.

He stopped beneath a dangling mobile made from discarded bus tickets.

‘In here.’

The room turned out to be both a study and a storeroom. On the wall opposite the door there was a computer, sitting humming on a desk strewn with paper. A plastic dictation arm stuck out from the right-hand side of the monitor, and a sheet of a4 was hanging down from the clipper. Dennison was halfway through a Word document, no doubt transcribing what he saw as life from the paper to the hard drive.

All of that took up only one corner. The rest of the room, to the left, was piled high with paper – or rather, hung high. He’d suspended a number of vertical storers from the ceiling – the kind normal people use for T-shirts and trousers – and filled each box with documents of all shapes and sizes. At least ten of them were hanging down from the ceiling like paper punchbags, almost touching the floor, with just enough room to move between them, and sticking out from the base of each section was a coloured tag, presumably to label the contents. Beyond these strange pillars, there was a window. Its dark blue curtains were drawn, and the sun was trying to fight its way through. It was failing. The only light in the room was coming from the monitor, and it was making the various label tags glow fluorescent, like nesting fireflies.

Dennison slid onto the seat in front of the computer and rattled out a few shortcuts on the keyboard. ‘Sorry it’s so idark in here.’

The Word document saved and disappeared.

‘It’s a wonder you can see to type.’

‘Sunlight wears the ink away.’ He didn’t seem to be paying much attention to me. Instead, his gaze was darting over the screen. He tapped another couple of keys, not needing to use the mouse at all. His fingers flicked about like a martial artist throwing kicks. Windows flashed up and then vanished again.

I looked around, secretly wondering what drove a man to want to do this.

‘This is your museum, then?’

‘Part of it.’ He gave me a look of irritation. ‘But it’s more like a zoo. These texts are all still alive. It’s just that nobody wants them right now.’

‘Imagine that.’

‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Imagine that.’

‘What are you doing now?’

He was going through screens at a hundred miles an hour; it was harder to keep track of Dennison in full flow that it was Graham, and that was saying something.

‘I’m logging into the main database. We have our own sections, but it’s not actually based here.’

I had a thought. ‘

Is it possible that Claire stored a copy of the file on your hard drive?’

‘Maybe. She probably just uploaded it straight from the disk, but I’ll check in a minute. Here we are.’

A new application window had opened, with buttons and menus across the top; the centre-to-bottom of the screen was taken up by a white box, divided into three columns. The columns were filled with filenames, seemingly at random. Although the screen was only long enough to show about forty names in each column, there was a scrollbar on the right-hand side, and it looked like it scrolled one fuck of a long way.

‘They’re listed in the order they arrived at the moment,’ he said. ‘Or at least they should be. The buttons at the top allow you to introduce more, and to search for a particular animal by species or filename.’

As I watched the screen, two of the names changed.

Dennison pointed quickly.

‘See that?’

‘Yeah.’

‘They just switched places. That file just jumped up close to that one. It skipped disk sectors.’

‘Why did it do that?’

‘Well, that’s what we don’t understand,’ he said. ‘We don’t know how or why it’s happening. This is what I meant when I said everything’s corrupted; it’s just all fucking up. They’re going at a rate of around two every ten seconds. Look.’

Another filename changed. ‘

They move all over the database. It’s getting faster, too.’

‘Nobody’s programmed it to do that?’ I said. ‘You must have a virus.’

‘We don’t have a virus.’ Dennison looked as though his intelligence had never been so insulted. ‘You don’t think we thought of that? We’re on Liberty, for God’s sake. A computer virus has got more chance of getting into you than our database. Look. There it goes again.’